I’m excited to share my latest translation with you all! For Latin American Literature Today‘s fourth issue, I translated the Peruvian writer Pedro Novoa’s short story “Carne de subasta,” or “Flesh for Auction.”
LALT is an awesome magazine, an offshoot of World Literature Today that publishes all its pieces in English and Spanish. Because of this, the story in its original Spanish is available to read in this issue. There’s also a fantastic interview with Pedro Novoa in which he talks about the story I translated:
Gabriel T. Saxton-Ruiz: In the short story “Carne de subasta” … you incorporate Mexican slang in the words of the protagonist Jalisco Méndez. What is your relationship with Mexico? How did this story originate?
Pedro Novoa: I have relatives in Sonora, Mexico. Herbert Ávila, a cousin of mine, went in the 80s to cross the border to the US and live as an undocumented immigrant over there. He was a “wet back,” was able to enter American soil and to not get deported back to Peru, he took out his Mexican passport. He’d get expelled from the country closer to the border and would attempt to cross again. And that’s what he did three times until they almost killed him. Because of that he stayed in Sonora where he raised a family and has found that stability that he’d longed for in the US. He’s the one who used to say we were “auction meat,” something to be offered up to the highest bidder. It’s a terrible image depicting the condition of many Latinos, and I racked my brain to recall the Mexican slang that my cousin had already made his own. And because it also seemed to me to be an interesting metaphor for the current situation of the Latino man. Someone who is sold to the highest bidder in our neoliberal, commodified and inhumane world.
On the other hand, I’m constantly on the lookout for terms with popular origins, and it seems to me that Peruvians and Mexicans have a rather vast inventory of colorful, symbolic and rhythmic words. This lexicon of Mexicanness also came to me through film and music. Just to mention the most important examples, the film Amores perros and a few songs by Control Machete and Cypress Hill.
(Read the full interview here.)
Moving this from Spanish to English was fun, with its snappy pace and Mexican slang everywhere! Originally, I was a little nervous (and excited) for the challenge of translating Peruvian Spanish for the first time—and then I was given a Mexican narrator to work with! A funny coincidence. I guess that challenge will have to wait a little longer.
I hope you enjoy reading Pedro Novoa’s story, in English or in Spanish!
Read my translation of Pedro Novoa, “Flesh for Auction,” in Latin American Literature Today.